There are a lot of cool features that are available on WordPress.com.
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that connects your self-hosted WordPress website to WordPress.com to use some of these features. (Not everyone loves Jetpack because it apparently bloats down your website, auto-activates features that you may not want, and leaves some people with an “icky” feeling. Also, it’s not completely free. Other people love it because it makes it way to easy to add cool features.)
Subscriptions are automatically turned on when you install Jetpack. You can add signup options in the comment section, as a widget in your sidebar, or by adding a shortcode into your post or page. You can read more about subscriptions here.
The cool thing about using a shortcode to put up your sign up form is that you can customize it. Just put in the following line in a blog post (without the space between the brackets.)
[ jetpack_subscription_form ]
Looking under the hood, there are a few options we can get from the code:
- show_subscribers_total=”true” (by default, false)
- title=”Subscribe to Blog via Email”
- subscribe_text=”Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.”
- subscribe_button=”Subscribe”
- subscribe_logged_in=”Click to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.”
Here’s an example of what you could do. (Just remove the spaces from around the square brackets):
[ jetpack_subscription_form show_subscribers_total=0 title=”Sign up for our email newsletter” subscribe_text=”Give us your email address and whenever I write something about assignments, homework, or tests, you’ll receive a little email in your inbox.” subscribe_button=”Sign up now!” ]
Cool, huh?
[jetpack_subscription_form show_subscribers_total=0 title=”Sign up for our email newsletter” subscribe_text=”Give us your email address and whenever I write something about assignments, homework, or tests, you’ll receive a little email in your inbox.” subscribe_button=”Sign up now!”]
This means, it’s easy to get a Jetpack email subscription form into a popup like with this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-popup/